Sunday, 18th of August, 2013

Tonight, we have a Wire Magazine compilation, new compilation series from Feral Media, and a new release by a quintet I’m a member of tonight, among other things…

LISTEN AGAIN for the first or next time, with linky at bottom or of course stream on demand in stereo at the FBi site.

A number of tracks tonight come courtesy of Wire Magazine‘s subscriber-only download compilation series Below the Radar, specifically volume 14 which just came out with the September issue.
First track to come off it is an amazingly intense piece of psych-drone-come-krautrock from Nottingham trio Kogumaza, whose album on Low Point I’ll have to get hold of stat. And you can too, please do.

Next is a new track (an alternative version of a track from their Manhunter release) from Melbourne duo James Rushford & Joe Talia, who really need to get more released digitally, as their cassette & vinyl thing is all very cute & all but really c’mon. In any case, it becomes rather gloriously beautiful halfway through. You’ll know Joe Talia from his work with Ned Collette and Oren Ambarchi. You better.

Third track from The Wire is a strangely minimalist piece from Lucrecia Dalt. It’s beautiful, with persistent sub-bass booms, but I say “strangely” because I came across her as an indiefolk/indietronic artist, introduced to me via a remix (still unreleased & exclusive to this show I believe) by Melbourne’s Part Timer – and then not long after, she contributed beautiful vocals to a Spartak track, under her real name, Lucrecia Pérez. New album is coming soon and I for one can’t wait.

And so it’s time for a little retrospective of Melbourne’s Evelyn Morris aka Pikelet. In the early days she would perform with percussion, guitar and perhaps keyboards, plus vocals, all fed through her looping pedal as a bed for her sweet indie pop songs. Along the way she’s gained a band (also called Pikelet) and her songs have become more band-oriented. But it’s still beautiful stuff (if you like that kind of thing, which obviously I do). Before her second album came out, I saw her perform “Toby Light” live a number of times, memorably the first time with just a little omnichord/Casio keyboard and a looping pedal. It’s still one of my favourites.

Composer Brian Harnetty has made a career of creating reverent yet radical works by exploring archival recordings – previously from the Berea College Appalachian sound archives, which we had a bit of a listen to tonight, but most recently from the enormous Sun Ra/El Saturn collection. I unfortunately have only a little knowledge of Sun Ra’s music (where to even start?) but Harnetty approaches this with full acknowledgement of not being a jazz musician, and not trying to recreate Sun Ra’s music. Instead it’s a reconfiguring of fragments of Sun Ra & his musicians’ playing, in-studio conversations, and Harnetty’s own composition; it’s illuminating, mysterious and still reverent to this 20th century master.

Back to the Wire compilation, we have a piece of heavy, noisy future techno from the mysterious Violetshaped, who gave us a pretty amazing remix 12″ last year featuring Roly Porter, Vatican Shadow AND Kangding Ray. And their own stuff lives up to that pedigree handily.

And keeping it epic and 4/4, the brilliant Andy Stott remixes young Bristolian Kowton, one of a number of the new generation of Brisol musicians profiled in this very month’s Wire magazine.

Second last, we have UFog stalwart Scissor Lock‘s contribution to the first of a series of “seasons” EPs that Feral Media is putting out. Suitably enough, the first is Winter, and you can pay what you want for it, right now.

And finally, my own music to finish the show. I don’t promote my own music a lot on the radio, but when it’s a collaboration with others, and especially here a quintet, well here you go. Tangents features me on cello & loops along with Ollie Bown of Icarus on laptop, Shoeb Ahmad on guitar/laptop/effects & Evan Dorrian on drums (both of Spartak, Evan also of indie/mathrock/collagists Golden Blonde & Pollen Trio) and Adrian Lim-Klumpes of 3ofmillions, Triosk etc on piano & effects. Is it a “supergroup”? We don’t know, but it certainly pools all our interests, most particularly improvisation, and covers as much ground as we can while still sounding cohesive. Well, I hope you like it!

Labels and artists!

email: utilityfog at frogworth dot com
Utility Fog teeters on the cusp between acoustic and electronic, organic and digital. Constantly changing and rearranging, this aural cloud of nanotech consumes genres and spits them out in new forms. Whether cataloguing the jungle resurgence, tracking the ups and downs of noise and drone, or unearthing the remnants of glitch and folktronica, all is contextualised within artist & genre histories for a fulfilling sonic journey.
Since all these genre names are already pretty ridiculous, we thought we'd coin a new one. So "postfolkrocktronica" it is. Wear it.